City registers 45,000 new TB cases in a yr

Mumbai: More than 45,000 TB cases were registered in Mumbai in the 12 months between April 2017 and March 2018. Of these, 4,891 patients suffer from multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB and 670 from the extremely drug-resistant (XDR) variant.
A senior state health department official said the government could provide treatment to all 4,891 MDR patients as they were identified through detection centres established under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP), including private hospitals.
A BMC official said that half the patients with drug-sensitive TB get treatment from the private sector. “We now manage to get data from the private sector as well. This has led to a sudden increase in the number of patients in the city,” said the official.
BMC TB officer Dr Daksha Shah said all MDR TB patients are being given medicines from the government sector.
“Even patients who have been referred from the private sector are given medicines for free and are regularly monitored. The public-private partnership is working well in Mumbai,” she added.
The Union health department takes periodical review of MDR patients from every district and city and issues new guidelines to tackle the situation. The state has instructed the BMC to follow the new guidelines issued by the Centre saying it should go for universal drug sensitivity test (DST), to provide new medicine and to adopt short regimen MDR treatment. — Sujit Mahamulkar